2 geckos one enclosure (male/female) ?

[ire123]

Hello! i’m currently the owner of 3 leopard geckos (all in seperate tanks as we learned when they were young they couldn’t be roommates)

Recently while going to petco to get crickets and mealworms, we were told that someone had surrendered 2 adult leopard geckos. They said they were available for adoption but HAD to be taken together. Unfortunately no one has taken them and it breaks our heart seeing them trying to climb near the glass to be held! We were considering getting them. Although 5 geckos is scary, we figured since they have to be together/ have always been roommates then one more tank isn’t that bad.

My question: I noticed one looked male and one looked female. Today when i came to look at them they had 2 huge eggs laying in between them! I know they have always lived together, but is it really even safe to have them live together? I saw the large male sometimes nudge the female to move (didn’t seem unfriendly just dominant). They both look well fed, lay together, and healthy. But i just am wondering if we should really keep them in one tank 24/7 if they’ll keep having eggs (which we don’t necessarily want). But honestly we can’t have 2 more tanks (on top of our 3 geckos already in seperate tanks - 2 males and 1 female)

 

[acpart]

Some people will say to never keep geckos together. Most of my geckos are in small groups and do fine. The problem with having a male and a female together is that, as you see, they do produce eggs and it's a drain on the female's resources without any result if you don't incubate the eggs. Some people are also concerned that it's not a good idea to keep a male with a female because the male will want to breed all the time and it will exhaust the female. When I was breeding leopard geckos, I kept the male with his females throughout the breeding season (usually about 9 months of the year) and rarely had a problem. I found that the male was eager to breed for the first part of the season and by early summer was pretty much done.
In general, with a male and a female it's probably best to house separately if you don't want to breed. There are creative ways to keep a larger number of enclosures. When I started in the hobby in 2003 I had 1 enclosure. I gradually increased my gecko collection and ended up with about 30 enclosures (if you want to see many of them, you can take a look at my recent Gecko Time photo essay: https://geckotime.com/what-goes-on-in-my-house-aliza-arzt/). As you'll see from the article, there are many creative ways to keep enclosures without having to have each one on its own table. This includes but is not limited to stacking front-opening enclosures on top of each other, or buying a shelf unit and putting enclosures on the shelves. Good luck with your decision. They're hard to resist, aren't they?

Aliza

 

[ZNature]

I personally would recommend keeping them separate. Of course you could try to cohab them longer but I wouldn’t recommend it as the female will become stressed. As mentioned above there are other creative ways to keep the tanks. I actually have created a “gecko bookshelf” to house some geckos that I can’t keep in bioactive enclosures because of some special needs and they are really great at saving space! It is basically a bookshelf with acrylic doors cut to size with air holes added as well as a place for cords to allow heating and decor and other things on the inside. I think you can find some videos on YouTube if you look up “how to build gecko bookshelf” My concern for them to live together is that sometimes Leo’s live together for years and suddenly one is found wounded by the other. I think that if you don’t want to breed them, you should probably keep separate. I wish you luck with your (possibly) new geckos!